The Casino (Paradise Springs) - Let's Beat the System!

With properly functioning games, meaning the card draws or dice rolls have realistic, fair odds, the best casino games for players to keep or make money in the long term are blackjack and craps, bar none. Every other traditional casino game features significantly higher odds in favor of the casino winning, so these two games are the only ones that are really worth coming back to play, unless you have money to burn. If you only follow basic strategy for blackjack, then craps will have slightly better odds, but you need to remember that you can increase the odds in your favor the most with blackjack, as long as you put in a little extra effort. The best playing strategy you can use for craps is just to play the dark side all the time (bet the don’t pass/don’t come and then lay odds), and that’s all there is to it, but for blackjack there are at least three great strategies you should learn and employ for optimal advantage play. The use of the first two in conjunction is crucial to winning big over the long term, and it’s not even hard to accomplish.

Blackjack strategies:

1.) The fundamental strategy is of course basic strategy. Better fall in love with it, because it’s the only way to play.

2.) The second most important play method is almost always overlooked or underplayed: systematically adjusting your bet size based on winning or losing streaks. Everyone knows that parlaying your bets after you win only gives you very small chances of winning big, and when you lose a parlayed bet, all of your earnings from the last streak are reset. Similarly, everyone knows that playing the classic martingale is inhibited by casino bet limits. The whole essence of this strategy is to drastically raise your bet directly from the minimum bet amount whenever the odds for winning the next hand are greatly in your favor, because the dealer won or had great cards so many times in a row while you were betting low. If you’re feeling a bit lucky, you can bet maximum again after you made a nice profit, but never bet high too many times in a row if you start losing money, because your goal should be to gradually climb higher and higher in earnings.

3.) Finally, as most people are aware of, but too lazy to even try, you should systematically adjust your bet size based on the card count, or the ratio of high value cards to low value cards left in the deck(s). This play method is trickier, especially if you’re playing with some face down cards, and impossible if the cards are shuffled after each hand. The count isn’t very often too extreme either; the high and low cards tend to have relatively well-mixed positions in the deck(s). Therefore, when card counting is even possible, it usually isn’t worth trying. However, if the playing conditions are right, and you have the patience and skill of a good counter, then you can potentially hit the jackpot by employing this strategy.

Bonus: Shuffle tracking, or following certain cards with your eyesight as they are shuffled through the deck(s), and identifying concealed cards deserve quick honorable mentions.

Now you should be set to have fun breaking the casino’s bank, right? Wrong. Paradise Springs can throw the effectiveness of any typical strategy out of the window, considering it does not feature properly functioning games, but instead highly and at times very obviously rigged games. Not only are the odds for the cards players draw a bit wacky, which can even benefit you, but at the drop of a hat, the intensity of a blackjack game can be cranked up a million degrees, and your Millennium Puzzle will be stolen from you. The dealer will start drawing blackjacks, 21s and 20s left and right, sometimes even nonstop for as long as you’ll stay at the table, or close to it. Basically, when the dealer wants to win, it’ll win. This extremely unfair cheating advantage for the house isn’t in effect all the time, but it can strike whenever it wants, whether you expect it or not, and whether you’re playing all alone or at a full table. So what should you do? How can you still make your money off of blackjack here? The answer is to quit playing whenever the house is cheating, and sneakily take advantage of the somewhat zany luck you’ll encounter, whenever the dealer’s God mode is recharging. I’m not sure I would even completely follow basic strategy all the time, because your intuition based on the experience of what you’re seeing can end up being better in this situation, but for the most part basic strategy still holds up.

This thread was created to get moar people playing smarter against the casino. If you have additional strategies or experiences you'd like to share, feel free to post them here.

Re: The Casino (Paradise Springs) - Let's Beat the System!

You can't beat Digital Leisure's Casino with proper play. None of their games produce statistically accurate results. I was part of a card counting team in the 90s. Any casino with odds as ridiculous as Paradise Springs would have been shut down by the state's gaming commission on opening weekend.

As you mentioned, there also seems to be a mechanism in place which creates a high string of wins for the house after about an hour of play. Instead of trying to beat the system, you should boycott Digital Leisure for cheating their customers. If everyone stopped buying chips, they'd switch to fair algorithms.

FalconHaunt wrote:

With properly functioning games, meaning the card draws or dice rolls have realistic, fair odds, the best casino games for players to keep or make money in the long term are blackjack and craps, bar none. Every other traditional casino game features significantly higher odds in favor of the casino winning, so these two games are the only ones that are really worth coming back to play, unless you have money to burn.

No. War is fast, has a low vig, and the cheating can be exploited much easier than blackjack or craps.

FalconHaunt wrote:

The best playing strategy you can use for craps is just to play the dark side all the time (bet the don’t pass/don’t come and then lay odds)

While that's a great strategy in a real Casino which will yield hours of entertainment on a meager bankroll, doing this in Digital Leisure's rigged version of craps is a formula for going broke fast. Pay attention to the point frequency and bet accordingly. Or just bet on Big 6/8. It's a sucker bet on a real craps table, but you may turn a profit with the Bizarro odds at Paradise Springs.

Re: The Casino (Paradise Springs) - Let's Beat the System!

No. War is fast, has a low vig, and the cheating can be exploited much easier than blackjack or craps.

War may be fast and very easy to play, and its vig is still relatively low, but it doesn't even compare to blackjack or craps, at least not without totally skewed odds. The house edge for war is usually at least 2% with proper odds, which is considerably higher. It's fine to play the other games, but they would deplete your money faster in the real world.

It's better to exploit the system. For example, Mermaid won a jacket last season with a brainless roulette strategy (playing the same 3 numbers ad nauseam).

It shouldn't be too hard to greatly exploit the system with blackjack. It's welcomed for people to post the best exploitations they have found for other games too. I would like to see people winning moar from Paradise Springs, and there is no real payment necessary.

Re: The Casino (Paradise Springs) - Let's Beat the System!

You can't beat Digital Leisure's Casino with proper play. None of their games produce statistically accurate results. I was part of a card counting team in the 90s. Any casino with odds as ridiculous as Paradise Springs would have been shut down by the state's gaming commission on opening weekend.

As you mentioned, there also seems to be a mechanism in place which creates a high string of wins for the house after about an hour of play.

I hate to promote conspiracy theories but I have to agree with this one. I reached over 430,000 in winnings at the VIP blackjack tables playing basic strategy, only losing a thousand chips along the way. Once I passed the half-million mark in total casino winnings, I lost 30,000 chips in about an hour, only increasing my winnings by 20,000 chips or so. In hindsight, I obviously should have quit sooner but I kept banking on a rebound that never came.

1,000 chips lost for 430,000 in winnings...

then 30,000 chips lost for the next 20,000?!?

Bad luck may be the only factor at play here but that's an awfully large turnaround in fortunes. The dealer certainly seems to hit 20 or 21 with remarkable frequency sometimes, especially when I'm standing on 19 or 20.

Of course, my luck with the cards at poker has been terrible as well lately so who knows?

Re: The Casino (Paradise Springs) - Let's Beat the System!

You're exactly right, MsLiZa. The experience you just described gave you more than a simple hunch; luck just doesn't work that way. It doesn't always take about an hour for the dealer to activate God mode (it can happen at different times), but the extreme luckiness of the dealer during certain times clearly illustrates flaws in the game. As I mentioned earlier in the other thread about earning the Penthouse, there is a concept called "standard deviation" that says there is a bell curve on a graph for the likelihoods of different lengths of winning or losing streaks, among any other odds involving the number of times certain events will occur out of the total number of events. The farther away you get from the center, the quicker the chances of those outcomes drop down, and so for so many people to report such unlikely experiences, even happening repeatedly, you know that blackjack (and other games) at Paradise Springs can't even have close to realistic mechanics. If enough attention is brought to the matter, hopefully the developers will be forced to do something to fix it, and they should own up to their dishonest practices.

Re: The Casino (Paradise Springs) - Let's Beat the System!

You can't beat Digital Leisure's Casino with proper play. None of their games produce statistically accurate results. I was part of a card counting team in the 90s. Any casino with odds as ridiculous as Paradise Springs would have been shut down by the state's gaming commission on opening weekend.

As you mentioned, there also seems to be a mechanism in place which creates a high string of wins for the house after about an hour of play.

I hate to promote conspiracy theories but I have to agree with this one. I reached over 430,000 in winnings at the VIP blackjack tables playing basic strategy, only losing a thousand chips along the way. Once I passed the half-million mark in total casino winnings, I lost 30,000 chips in about an hour, only increasing my winnings by 20,000 chips or so. In hindsight, I obviously should have quit sooner but I kept banking on a rebound that never came.

1,000 chips lost for 430,000 in winnings...

then 30,000 chips lost for the next 20,000?!?

Bad luck may be the only factor at play here but that's an awfully large turnaround in fortunes. The dealer certainly seems to hit 20 or 21 with remarkable frequency sometimes, especially when I'm standing on 19 or 20.

Of course, my luck with the cards at poker has been terrible as well lately so who knows?

It's not a conspiracy when it happens to everyone. The numbers just don't work.

With a five deck shoe, the odds of hitting blackjack are:

2*(4/13)*[4*5/(52*(5-1)] = 5.91% (1 in 17)

The odds of hitting blackjack three times in a row are 1 in 4,844. But the dealer in Digital Leisure's casino hits triple blackjacks every few hundred hands.

Besides myself, I've met half a dozen Home users who've watched the dealer hit at least 5 blackjacks in a row. The odds of this happening are 1 in 1.4 million. At least one casino regular (ITCOB1) has been dealt 7 blackjacks in a row. The odds?

1 in 397 million

All of the other games have similar probelms--even hold 'em. I've only played a few hundred hands, but I've made three quads and a straight flush. Full boats should not be more common than flushes.